The degree programme begins with simple tasks in each fundament: image, text, interaction, language and processes. In the second year, students face more complex challenges that require two fundaments to be combined. In the final year, all five fundaments are applied using the cross-medial approach, i.e. several media simultaneously. Throughout the entire degree programme, regular hands-on application of the skills acquired lays a solid groundwork for professional practice. Accompanied and independent periods of study alternate.
The Degree Programme: Structure and Content
In the first year, students acquire formal and technical skills in, among other things, colour and silkscreen printing, photography, pictograms, illustration, fonts and typesetting. In our workshop – which is equipped for Desktop Publishing (DTP) and several printing techniques, namely letterpress, flat screen, intaglio and silkscreen – they study and practice the A to Z of realising print and online products as well as the traditional craft of bookbinding.
In the second year, they apply various combinations of the skills acquired thus far to increasingly complex tasks in poster design, photo graphics or the field of corporate publishing.
In the third year, the focus is on editorial design and infographics, and the cross-medial realisation of design concepts.
Fictitious and real commissions and competitions are brought into play, so that students can hone and test their skills on the sort of projects they will encounter in their future professional practice.
From the very start students are encouraged also to express themselves with concision and clarity. They learn to formulate concepts as well as to talk in depth about the impulses driving their work, and to defend the outcomes with conviction. In the theory modules they address theoretical and scientific issues in the arts, design, media studies, cultural studies and philosophy, and thereby learn both to draw on such methodological insights in their practical work and, vice versa, to gain theoretical insights from their artistic practice.
In the first and second years, moreover, students take the interdisciplinary IDA modules lasting several weeks, which assure them ample opportunity to explore current issues and trends in collaboration with students from other disciplines, under the aegis of an interdisciplinary team of lecturers.
Bachelor’s Degree
Students conclude their course by realising a written and practical Bachelor project, as a rule on a theme of their own choosing. The creative Bachelor project consists of several parts and may be realised as a print or screen (i.e. online) product. Students can delve into the world of signs and fonts by extending the alphabet, can create infographics in several media, or elaborate a theme through an original book design. Projects are realised independently – though under dual (theoretical and practical) mentorship –and then presented to a jury and the general public.
The Bachelor in Graphic Design equips graduates to work in a variety of fields in visual communications – or to pursue a Master’s in Graphic Design and so further refine and broaden their talents and skill sets.
